The man who is the most unpredictable American president of all time lives in what is, if you stop to think about it, a remarkably predictable world. Each of his seemingly strange and unexpected acts, tweets, bizarreread more

They say the last sip of a drink is mostly backwash. The last understanding of a war should be that every speck of it is backwash in the sense used by Ellen N. La Motte in her 1916 book The Backwash of War. La Motte was a U.S. nurse who worked at a French hospital in Belgium not far from a semi-permanent front line at which men slaughtered each other for no discernable purpose for months on end, and the mangled bodies from one side, plus the occasional civilian, were brought into theread more

Recently, at a rally in Wisconsin, President Trump implicitly attacked the late Senator John McCain over Obamacare: “We should’ve had health care, but one man decided to vote against it.” He was referring to the Republican Senate’s 2017 attempt at a “skinny repeal” of the Affordableread more

Two months ago, I heard a story. You heard it too, if you went anywhere near a television or a newspaper in the United States. The government of Venezuela needed to be overthrown because it wouldn’t allow in humanitarian aid.

The story was false, of course. The United States had imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela for years, resulting in 40,000 deaths (with more being added every day) and sought toread more

Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org

Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.

While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidationread more